Saturday, 12 September 2015

I have mixed feelings about Corbyn's triumph: shame,
obviously, that a man with such repugnant associations should be the leader of
a major British political party; embarrassment that the the Labour Party should
have reduced itself to ridicule; excitement at the prospect of some hitherto
unlikely politics; fear that a demagogue will be elected into power in 2020;
but, above all, a kind of melancholy at the sheer stupidity that has brought it
to pass. But, hey, what do I know? I'm just an ageing bloke with a belief in
that old-time liberal democracy. And, ok, I admit, the feelings aren't really that mixed.

Sunday, 6 September 2015

Two of the three winners of
the 2012/2013 Iota Shot pamphlet competition, Sarah Roby and Kim Lasky are both
expressive poets, their voices distinctively their own. Though the pamphlets
are very different in style and substance, they share an internal coherence
that perhaps lifted them above other submissions.

Lasky’s Eclipse, is a “brief lyric sequence” in free verse.Lasky spent time with astronomers during a
residency in the Astronomy and Physics Department at the University of Sussex,
and the result is this slim pamphlet.It
is best read as a single poem, themes and images woven through the sequence to
make it whole.

It is addressed to a never
wholly revealed “you” who tells the poet about “the relative size / of moon and
earth” (p.1, lines 5&6), or that “on a clear night… / the moon is a plump
blood orange” (p. 2, lines 1&2), who talks “for hours about such things”
(p.3, line 2) as the speed of light.Most of the sections begin with this telling of astronomical fact, which
is then taken from the sky, as it were, and bedded in the quotidian.And so we move from Galileo’s telescoping of
the moon to his daughter’s request for linen, from the mathematics of E=mc2 to
speedy black coffee, from “the curvature of space-time” (p.4, line 3) to “a
curvature of the spine” (p.4, line 10).

As the sequence develops, so
phrases get repeated, images recur, often with symbolic heft: black coffee,
dark matter, horses, a tarpaulin, telescopes, fruit (apples especially,
Newtonian and paradisal and so on).It becomes
clear that there is a tentative narrative, and a certain place: a farm, from
the windows of which the poet and “you” watch the sky, where they become
intimate, and then abandon one another: “gravitational attraction / between two
bodies dies with distance” (p.10, line 8).

The sequence grows with the
reading and re-reading.To purloin a
simile, the re-reading is like the focusing of a telescope.Clarity emerges. Eclipse has a delicate coherence, beginning with Galileo and ending
with Genesis. To dissect much further would be verging on murder.

Sarah Roby is a very
different kind of poet.While we might
imagine Lasky at work with a Rotring pen, Roby we see as happier with a packet
of good broad-nibbed felt tips.This
poet likes to fill the page.

The first poem in the
pamphlet, ‘H. Rider Haggard’s Bare-Knuckle Wrestle with Time-on-his-Hands’ is
divided into six three-line verses, but there is no obvious reason other than
to give the reader a pause for breath between gobbets of the poet’s enjoyable
rant.She obviously is not a fan of H.
Rider Haggard, for whom it is difficult not to feel a little sympathy. The
effect is to send one back to King
Solomon’s Mines to see what the fuss is about.

Having just disapprovingly
read She, the poet is now to be
found, in company with the afternoon of the collection’s title, “sloughed in
front of a matinee” (p. 2, line 3), watching Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen.I think the poet may disapprove of that, too,
but she is obviously drawn to adventure, or perhaps only Africa.

Adventure continues in
‘Levity III’.Levity III is, in real
life, a luminaria, “designed to
generate a sense of wonder at the beauty of light and colour,” according to the
literature. The poet’s children appear to enjoy it. The poet’s partner is not
convinced.He is “effortful in patience”
(p. 5, line 7). This leads to the poem’s conclusion, where its meaning lies.
The partner lets “a defence or two / fall, and smiles” (p. 5, line 9/10)
promising lift off (or, of course, “levity”) for the adults, but it is not be
because the adventure is over and bath time and work beckon.

There’s homework too to do in
the following poem ‘The Present Participle’.As in the previous poem, it is Sunday.Mother and son should really be outside.The boy “needs his Sunday trees to climb” (p.6, line 9). As the next
poem (‘I Spy in the Home’) unfolds it is difficult not to imagine the son
liberated and the mother left to watch a butterfly emerge. Sunday (perhaps
‘Sunday and I’ might have been a more apt title for the collection?) continues
in ‘The Aurelian’.I don’t know whether
you are supposed to know Nabokov’s short story, but an ‘aurelian’ is someone
interested in butterflies.The poet here
puts herself in that position, netting and pinning a butterfly. It is of course
a work of irony in which the narrator unwittingly demonstrates the cruelty of reducing
a living thing to a mere emblem, coffined“in a glass-topped box” (p. 9, line 3).

I sat beneath a willow tree,
Where water falls and calls;
While fancies upon fancies solaced me,
Some true, and some were false.

Rossetti

…slow

to realise how a history of hunching,

hair dripped, over white paper

will mean each new idea

begins Within the willow

Roby (p.11, lines16-20)

There follow two sonnets,
perhaps the best poems in the little collection, ‘Ritual’ and ‘Ritual II’, both
commencing with the truth that “Secular living still needs ritual” (p.12, line
1).In the former, the more successful,
or at least more touching, of the two, there is a hint of Heaney-like
tenderness in the octave; the sestet has a Larkinian tinge, especially in the
melancholia of the last line, “a reminder that we matter, here, now”.

The final two poems share a
similar technique, using analogy as metaphor. But I did not understand ‘Protest
Song’ which mixes PJ Harvey singing and her mother-in-law having “an
imperceptible heart attack” (p.14, line 8).This is perhaps an antonymic analogy, but the full meaning escaped
me.

The last poem, ‘How we grieve
now’ I hesitate to criticize, as it concernsa still birth and is written in memory of Michael Jackson.It is an uncomfortable poem to read, and
powerful.We are a long way from H.
Rider Haggard.

I thought I was going to have trouble with this, what with
the first poem being all right justified and containing words with spaces
between their letters for no very obvious reason. But then I decided that since
it was called ‘Against Perspective’ I’d chuckle instead.

My fear was dispelled by and the chuckle grew broader with
the next poem, called ‘I’ve Been Crumbling Anti-Histamines Into Your Food All
Week’, in which a new home is turned into a bower: “the whole thing seeds
itself up the street. Early outbreaks / of lovage, sweet briar, vetch”.Here we are on the floral side of Myrtle. But the poet is a classicist, and in the Rome
of Ovid and his fellows the Latin word myrtus (myrtle) was a non-vulgar euphemism
for the female pudenda. Myrtle was considered aphrodisiac, and is associated
with Aphrodite in Greek myth and Venus in Roman.So having given us the floral, the poet now
introduces us to the clitoral, or at least the aphrodisiacal, in ‘Borrowed
Time’: “This afternoon you fucked me, right out / of my pyjamas and into yours”
Thenceforth the poems hover back and forth, between the intimate and the
public, with diversions into the quotidian here and there.

There’s plenty of tenderness, of a robust kind: “Come the
apocalypse” there’ll be “usurping girls / …I’ll just / have to learn to kill”.In a rather macabre love poem, ‘On Fear of
Your Flying’ her lover’s sperm “startle // into memento mori”. His having not died, I can’t believe her
partner would not want to be identified as the “gorgeous boy” of the final
poem, a play on a deliciously euphemistic Horace ode: “Be mine, right here
beneath / this cheerful old vine”.

Horace is not the only classical poet Wiggins borrows
from.She does a wonderful job with a
Propertius elegy.‘Only the Lover’
begins “Silly mortals, always second-guessing / the hour of your death…”

You type your vital stats into
deathclock.com

but from the Circle Line to Tora
Bora,

all exit points are hidden.

The language, the forms, the prosody in all these poems is
unabashed, unafraid and enjoyably energetic.Best of all, each poem is a surprise. Wiggins has a distinctive voice,
characterised not by sameness but by unexpectedness. ‘Crawk’ is a poem about
birds. I thought at first the reference was to crows, but the subject of the
poem has a “quarrel of sisters”, which suggests sparrows; then again, towards
the poem’s end she “Grouts her gizzard and gargles with rocks”.Who knows what bird this is (it follows a
poem, ‘Leda’ that features not one but several swans, not to mention eagles) –
but it doesn’t really matter.The poem
draws the reader in, for it is full of activity, having begun with the
teasingly abstract “She’s the opposite of mirrors”, from where we have no idea
where the poem will lead us.

Yes, unexpectedness: there’s a poem describing the poet’s
battle with a spider; a poem about the herb rosemary; a poem that bounces from
side to side of the page, about the coming of spring, “cracking a courtyard
laugh”; there are poems inspired by paintings; there’s a nanny goat and there’s
a fox.

Myrtle is a
thoroughly assured collection informed by classical learning and tempered with
an erotic hum that underlies several of the poems. It delights in hoisting the
ideas and images that prose cannot without preparation.It is thorough poetry, and surprisingly a
debut. There’ll be more.